HONOLULU — The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Center for Chinese Studies recently announced the latest awards presented to graduate students and faculty members of the university from the Chung Fong and Grace Ning/ Confucius Institute Fund for Chinese Studies. The fund benefits graduate students and faculty members with China-focused academic projects by providing support for conference or research travel; purchase of books, materials, or supplies; and hiring student assistance.

The latest award winners include:

Kuan-Hung Chen, PhD student, philosophy

— Travel to Taiwan to present the paper "Cognition, Language, Symbol, and Meaning Making: A Comparative Study of Epistemic Standings of Yijing and Whitehead" at the International Conference on Creativity and Process.

Chung-ying Cheng, professor, philosophy

— Summer travel and research assistance for data collection for further study of the Yijing.

Hong Jiang, assistant professor, geography

— Literature/archival research in Taiwan for "Ecological and Ethnic Discourses of China‘s West."

Chan Lee, PhD student, philosophy

— Travel to San Francisco to present a chapter of dissertation on "Zhu Xi on Ontological Reflection of Self-Cultivation."

Kevin Lo, PhD student, international management

— Research travel to gather data for a study measuring guanxi vs. networking tendencies at the individual level in Shanghai.

Pu Miao, associate professor, architecture

— Support for presentation in a series called "Architecture and Urban Planning in China and Belgium," held throughout 2007.

Jungmin Seo, assistant professor, political science

— Summer research travel support to complete work on three studies: on the Korean Chinese community in Beijing, on "Two Ends of Asia: East Asia and the Islamic World," and on the Chinese cultural industry.

Travel to present "The Journey to Interiority: Lyricizing the National Catastrophe in the Wartime" at the 9th Biennial Conference of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature in Chengdu, and to conduct research for a book project on the formative experiences of young writers living in Chongqing, Yanan, and Kunming during the Sino-Japanese War.

Constantinos Vrakas, MA student, Asian studies

— Travel support and production costs to film a documentary on the construction of ethnic identity by Uyghur migrants running ethnic restaurants in Shanghai.

Shu-Ling Wu, MA student, East Asian Languages and Literatures

— Travel support to present "Cognitive Perspectives on Historical Development of Causal Expressions" at the Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop in Hong Kong.

Yiyuan Xu, assistant professor, psychology

— Travel support to present a paper on how Chinese culture influences children‘s conception and expression of shyness, at the conference of the Asian Association of Social Psychology in Sabah, Malaysia.

Man (Beryl) Yang, MA student, ethnomusicology

— Support to conduct fieldwork for MA thesis on Chinese ethnic minority musical identities, using as a case study the "National Young Singers Competition" held in 2006 in Beijing.

Kate Zhou, associate professor, political science

— Research travel support to complete the book "China‘s Long March to Freedom: Grassroots Liberalization through Individual Action" in China.

The Chung-Fong and Grace Ning Fund is named for the parents of UH Mānoa Center for Chinese Studies Associate Director Cynthia Ning. Chung Fong and Grace, long-time Hawaiʻi residents originally from China, lived in Pakistan for 17 years before arriving in the United States. All four of their children received scholarships to pursue their education in the United States, and as a token of their appreciation, the Nings set aside a portion of their savings for an endowment at the University of Hawaiʻi to benefit the Chinese Studies program.